Catholic Commentary
Forbidden Birds: The Abominable Species
13“‘You shall detest these among the birds; they shall not be eaten because they are an abomination: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture,14the red kite, any kind of black kite,15any kind of raven,16the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk,17the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl,18the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey,19the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe, and the bat.
Leviticus 11:13–19 lists twenty-three bird species and the bat as unclean animals forbidden for consumption by the Israelites, including eagles, vultures, ravens, owls, hawks, and other predatory or carrion-feeding birds. These creatures are prohibited because they inhabit realms of death, chaos, and wilderness that lie outside the sanctified covenantal space Israel must maintain through dietary practice.
The birds Israel must detest — from eagle to bat — are not arbitrary taboos but a spiritual curriculum: what you consume shapes what you become.
Commentary
Leviticus 11:13 — The Command to Detest and the Category of Abomination The section opens not with mere prohibition but with an affective command: Israel must detest (Hebrew shaqats) these birds. The verb is unusually strong — it is the same root used elsewhere for idols (Deut 7:26) — signaling that this is not dietary preference but a training of the moral will. The three birds named first — the nesher (eagle or griffon vulture), peres (bearded vulture), and ozniyyah (black vulture) — are all apex raptors and carrion-feeders. Their uncleanness follows a discernible logic articulated by subsequent rabbinic and patristic commentary: birds of prey that tear living flesh, or carrion birds that feed on death, participate symbolically in the antithesis of life. Israel is a people consecrated to the God of the living (Deut 5:26); what feeds on death cannot nourish them. The eagle's inclusion is striking given its later positive symbolism (Exod 19:4; Rev 4:7), which suggests that the dietary code operates at a different register than symbolic or apocalyptic imagery — a distinction Augustine would later find productive.
Verses 14–15 — Kites and Ravens: Predation and Darkness The da'ah (red kite) and its kin (ayyah, black kite) are swift aerial predators associated in ancient Near Eastern literature with war and battlefield carnage (cf. Job 28:7, where the kite's path is inaccessible to human wisdom). The raven ('orev), listed in verse 15 with its varieties, carries the most layered biblical symbolism: sent out from the ark only to wander over the waters of chaos (Gen 8:7), fed miraculously by God (1 Kgs 17:4–6; Ps 147:9), yet unmistakably associated with desolate places and omens of ruin (Isa 34:11; Prov 30:17). Its uncleanness for eating does not negate God's providential care for it — Jesus himself cites the ravens God feeds (Luke 12:24) — but underscores the ritual logic: the raven occupies the margins of the ordered cosmos.
Verses 16–18 — Owls, Gulls, Hawks, and the Birds of Desolation Verses 16–18 catalogue a dense list of nocturnal and predatory birds: the bath-ya'anah (horned owl or ostrich, translations vary), tachmas (screech owl), shachaf (gull), varieties of nets (hawk), the kos (little owl), shalak (cormorant), yanshuph (great owl), tinshemeth (white owl), qa'ath (desert owl), and racham (osprey). Owls appear repeatedly in the prophets as emblems of God's judgment upon fallen cities: Babylon (Isa 13:21), Edom (Isa 34:11–15), and Nineveh (Zeph 2:14) all become haunts of owls when God abandons them to desolation. The cormorant (shalak, literally "the plunger") is a diving bird associated with maritime chaos. The cumulative effect of this list is to evoke the anti-world: the wilderness, the ruin, the realm of chaos that Israel must not internalize through eating.
Leviticus 11:19 — The Stork, Heron, Hoopoe, and Bat The list closes with seemingly gentler birds: the stork (chasidah, meaning "the faithful/kind one" — a striking name), the heron, the hoopoe (duchiphath), and the bat. The stork's name chasidah echoes chesed (covenant kindness), yet it is forbidden — perhaps because it is a migratory bird that cannot be fully domesticated into Israel's settled, covenantal space, or because it is a predator of reptiles and fish. The hoopoe, a magnificently crested bird, appears in the Song of Songs' landscape and in later Islamic tradition as King Solomon's messenger — but here it is unclean. The bat is notable as the closing entry: taxonomically a mammal, not a bird (a distinction modern zoology confirms), its placement here reflects the ancient grouping of all flying creatures under 'oph. Its dwelling in caves and tombs, its nocturnal habits, and its association with underworld spaces likely drive its classification. The list thus moves from the most powerful (eagle) to the most liminal (bat), encompassing the entire range of creatures that inhabit the spaces Israel must avoid absorbing into itself.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition brings a distinctive three-layered hermeneutic to this passage: the literal, the typological, and the moral-anagogical.
Church Fathers and the Typological Reading Origen of Alexandria (Homilies on Leviticus, Hom. VII) was the most systematic in reading the forbidden birds as types of vices and demonic powers. The eagle of prey, for Origen, typifies pride and the rapacious intellect that seizes truths only to devour them; the vulture signifies those who feed on the corruption of others' souls; the raven, with its black plumage and wandering, represents the darkened mind that never returns to rest in God (a reading later echoed in the Glossa Ordinaria). Augustine (Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, VI.7) argued that the dietary laws were not arbitrary but were given as "signs and figures" (signa et figurae) of moral realities — the forbidden animals signifying souls to be avoided rather than imitated. This reading was canonized in Catholic exegesis: the Catechism's treatment of Scripture's four senses (CCC §115–119) legitimizes precisely this move from the literal to the moral sense.
Aquinas and the Rational Order of the Law Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 102, Art. 6) systematically addressed the dietary laws, arguing that they had literal reasons (related to health, ethnic distinctiveness, and the avoidance of idolatrous feasting) as well as figurative reasons. The birds of prey, he argued, were forbidden to discourage Israelites from imitating rapacity, violence, and the hoarding of goods — the virtues of the predator being antithetical to covenantal solidarity. This is not merely allegorical fancy: Aquinas grounds it in the moral purpose of law itself, which is to form virtuous citizens of the covenant.
The Catechism and the Formation of Conscience The Catechism teaches that the Old Law, while imperfect, was "holy, spiritual, and good" (CCC §1963), a "pedagogy" that prepared Israel — and through Israel, all humanity — for Christ. The command to detest the forbidden birds speaks to CCC §1776: conscience is "a judgment of reason" that must be formed and trained, not merely consulted. The affective dimension of the Hebrew shaqats — visceral loathing — anticipates what the tradition calls the sensus catholicus of moral repugnance toward grave evil. Holiness is not merely intellectual assent but a schooling of desire.
Christological Fulfillment Jesus declares all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and Peter's vision in Acts 10 explicitly abrogates these laws for the Church. Yet as Origen and later Barnabas (, Ch. 10) argue, the content is not abolished: the call to avoid the spiritual analogues of these birds — rapacity, carrion-feeding on others' sin, the dark wandering of the raven-mind — remains perennially binding.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics no longer observe these dietary laws, yet this passage challenges us in a pointed way: what do we consume spiritually, and what should we detest? The logic of Leviticus 11 is that what you eat shapes what you become. Applied to the modern media and information environment, the question becomes urgent: the "forbidden birds" of our age may be the content — predatory, carrion-feeding, nocturnal — that we habitually ingest through screens. Do we feed on others' humiliation (the vulture)? Do we consume content that circles endlessly over death and ruin (the raven)? Do we operate by night, in the dark habits of anonymous cruelty or secret vice (the owl)?
The command to detest is also instructive. Aquinas knew that the moral life requires not just avoidance but the cultivation of a rightly ordered revulsion — what he called honestas, the moral sensibility that finds evil genuinely repellent. Catholics today are often encouraged to be "non-judgmental," but this passage reminds us that formed conscience involves real discrimination. The Examen of St. Ignatius Loyola is a practical tool for this: daily review of what we have "consumed" — in thought, image, and word — and whether it has drawn us toward life or toward the desolate places where owls dwell.
Cross-References